The Bahamas Sea Turtle Conservation Group

Oh, how they cry

March 8, 2008
In My Opinion
By Diane Phillips (Exclusively for The Tribune)

             He wielded a billy club and wore a full black wet suit, though the water wasn’t all that cold. The large net was out, held in place by lines with lead weights, a circle of death. Ten or so fishermen in two dinghies circled it. A third boat with a single man aboard stood off a little ways. There was a diver in the water.

They were already in place, preparing for the kill when we pulled toward them off Green Cay across from Rose Island. “What are you netting?” we asked with friendly wave and smile that Sunday. “Goggle eye,” one of the fishermen lied, waving back. We pretended to be as stupid as they took us for, partially because the sun was brilliant and the beach so enticing it threw us off, our instincts for a moment lulled. Maybe we wanted to believe the best, not wanting to believe what we feared, that what they were really netting was a turtle. We had seen it there a week before and had come back up to look for it again, wondering if it would still be there, thinking out loud how great it was to see a turtle close to Nassau, a once common sight, now rare.

The fishermen paid little attention to us at first. We moved off and watched the boats from a distance. I swam and dove down twice to touch young queen conch, silently wishing them safety from greedy hands. There were too many small shells on the bottom, their crown smashed, meat snatched before their lip was turned. The day before I had noticed a whole stand of fighting conch on Bay Street in front of what is still called the Straw Market for some reason, taken for the sale of their magnificent multi-coloured brown shell, the inedible meat inside tossed aside. I swam and wondered at the recent absence of milk conch that used to be everywhere. And starfish. And sea biscuits instead of just sea urchins.

I snorkelled back to the boat and looked over at the fishermen, a sickening visceral feeling in the pit of my stomach beginning to rise up inside me and take hold. Even from that distance, I could see the man in the wet suit. He was leaning over the side of one of the boats ready to clobber, the billy club poised. We started up, upped anchor and ran over, two women and one young man trying to stop the inevitable, interfering by staring and glaring at a dozen fishermen bent on death for dollars. We circled and hovered and hovered and circled. One of the boats began to chase us.

Down in the net, still swimming probably frantically, we couldn’t see, maybe confused, fighting for a freedom he had no means of expressing in words that the men above him could understand, was the sea turtle. They later said it was a loggerhead as if that made it okay.

They didn’t hear him cry. They didn’t see the tears. Did they know a turtle shed tears, just like a child? Did they know it cried like a baby? That its sound was plaintive and painful and could break your heart, like your own child crying out in pain when you can’t run to him fast enough to kiss it all better. The sound, the fear, the howl of a wounded being pleading to the sky for help. And no one answers.

Did the fishermen know any of that? Did they know that the Bahamas was one of 115 countries that banned turtle killing in 1973 when they signed on to The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES)? Did they know? Did they care?

We had watched them for nearly two hours, hoping to shame them into letting the turtle go free. We got a call from Nassau and had to pull off, hoping still they knew they had been seen and they could not do what we feared they wanted to do.

  The last thing we heard was the cry.

Where has our humanity gone? When did we fool ourselves into thinking that we were civilized because we are kind enough to let a car out in front of us in traffic, when we turn our backs on child molestation? When did we stop caring that the elderly woman down the block had not been seen all week, that the young boy who used to smile at us now scowls, that the gang of teens with baggy pants and swagger in their step wanted identity so badly they were willing to grab hold of it wherever they could find it?

What we do to a sea turtle is not just about turtles. It’s about us as a people. If 115 countries agree it is morally and environmentally wrong to slaughter a threatened or endangered species, if some countries go to the trouble of funding turtle excluder devices that save turtles from being netted even where nets are used, and we continue the barbaric practice of clubbing, towing, and dragging 300 pounds of crying flesh up a boat ramp before death comes as a kind alternative, what does it tell the world about Bahamians?

Not all our inhumanity to one another can be replaced with kindness overnight, but we can begin as we did today with the turtle. Instead of allowing turtles to be slaughtered, we can delineate wildlife refuges or preserves, particularly near inhabited islands so that those who reside or visit can see the marine wonders of our world. We can create a nesting protection program that would become an activity for adults and schoolchildren and even for visitors to enjoy, walking the beach by night with low flashlights, putting up small protective fences during nesting season to protect turtle eggs and then monitoring them. We can make understanding the life cycle of a turtle a part of the marine biology curriculum. And while Government does not have the resources to patrol every foot of our 100,000 square mile waters, it can sound a clarion call about the heinous nature of inhumane slaughter and the legal consequences of breaking the law, including fines and possible imprisonment. The Bahamas National Trust, BREEF and other conservation organisations can appoint “eyes” or deputize wardens with civilian arrest authority, as the National Trust does now in certain other areas. All those steps combined create a beginning. Beyond that, it is really about finding the gentle side of ourselves again. Dr. David Allen is right when he says we have become an angry nation. Our inhumanity to turtles when others all over the world have banned such inhumanity is only one sign. The mother who has lost a child to violence knows a far graver sign.

We in the Bahamas are fortunate. We have no outside war with an enemy whose ideology differs from our own. Our war is with ourselves. Our greatest threat lies within, the widening of our own vacuous morality that pays lip service to what is good and right and fails to admit that we watch a child being bullied without getting involved or we see the slaughter of an animal without taking action, it means we are immune to pain. If we do not feel the pain of others, then we must look carefully in the mirror and ask ourselves who we have become.

Silence is the voice of cowardice.
The last thing I heard was the cry of the turtle.
It stirred me to action and I vowed it would not be the last battle I fought.

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